Rap rockers Linkin Park show signs of life

Thursday

Aug 30, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Craig S. Semon Tracks

When Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote “’Tis better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all,” he obviously never heard of Linkin Park.

Last time out on the band’s nihilistic, near-missed, nu-metal masterpiece “A Thousand Suns,” Linkin Park’s singer Chester Bennington and rapper Mike Shinoda were singing, rapping, screeching and screaming about the end of days.

This time out, the rap-metal pioneers from Agoura Hills, Calif., (which also features guitarist Brad Delson, bassist Dave “Phoenix” Farrell, drummer Rob Bourdon and turntablist Joseph Hahn) are singing, screeching and screaming about the end of a dysfunctional relationship with a no-good woman (in the nu-metal universe, is there any other kind?) and make parting with such sweet sorrow sound like the end of humanity as we know it.

Alas, Linkin Park have loved and lost, like the most of us. But, unlike mere mortals, their romantic bellyaching and bile-spewing tirades are overly inflated to Biblical proportions. It’s a broken heart for Pete’s sake, not an outbreak of boils, an infestation of frogs or swarms of locusts.

An unhealthy relationship festers into something ugly and unholy on the leadoff track, “Lost in the Echo.” Shinoda once offered unconditional love and devotion to the object of his affection (and/or infliction) until he realized that he was being played. He confronts his toxic, two-timing torturer-temptress the only way he knows, by boasting how cool he is. Shinoda snaps, “I don’t hold back. I hold my own/I can’t be mapped. I can’t be cloned/I can’t C-flat. It ain’t my tone/I can’t fall back. I came too far.” While the self-serving raps and screaming demon chorus (courtesy of the usual choirboy sounding Bennington) are enough to do the trick, the sputtering synths, staccato guitars and ricocheting backbeats collide to form the foundation for this unflinching primal scream therapy set to music.

Sifting through the wrecking of his recent dating disaster, Bennington does an inventory on the irreversible damage and lingering phantom pain on the provocative, pity-party power ballad, “In My Remains.” Serenading his serrated heart with the accompaniment of dirge-like synth chords that devour everything in its unsuspected path, Bennington comes up with the unsettling mantra, “Now in my remains/Are promises that never came/Set this silence free/To wash away the worst of me.” With a military, rat-tat-tat drum roll, Shinoda suggests that the broken-hearted (at least, in Linkin Park’s case) have a kinship with grunt soldiers that are unmercifully mowed down in battle. Heavy-handedness aside, “In My Remains” unfolds like an exquisite, eternal struggle for one’s sanity and one’s sense of self.

Bennington and Shinoda want to break the cycle by adding fuel to the fire on the album’s by-the-number assault on one’s senses, “Burn It to the Ground.” The official anthem of this year’s NBA playoffs (what the Linkin Park guys’ personal hell has to do with playing hoop, other than strategic commercial placement, is anybody’s guess), “Burn It to the Ground” has a built-in, fist-pumping but brain-numbing chorus that might put couch potato sports enthusiasts into a tizzy but, as a whole, the blaring synth chords, whip-cracking electronica beats and the fire-breathing sentiment is not confrontational or combustible enough to make it truly work.

Linkin Park sets out to “show ya exactly how the breaking point sounds” on “Lies, Greed, Misery.” Alongside sputtering synths that sounds like they’re being played by an organist at a hockey game suffering a seizure, a hellbent Bennington unleashes blood-curdling screams, as well as the stinging sentiment “I want to see you choke on your lies/Swallow up your greed/Suffer all alone in your misery…You did it to yourself.” Who needs a Hallmark card when you can unleash the fury of hell?

Bennington makes his long overdue exit from his unhealthy, abusive relation on “I’ll Be Gone.” Shrouded in crunchy guitars, crashing drums and cascading strings (the latter courtesy of Arcade Fire’s arranger Owen Pallett), Bennington bemoans, “When the lights go out and we open our eyes/Out there in the silence, I’ll be gone/I’ll be gone.” Don’t let the door hit your backside on the way out.

“Castle of Glass,” Linkin Park’s haphazard stab at alt-country, features Shinoda trying to sing, rather than rap (bad move) and a cumbersome, over-extended metaphor about “a crack in this castle of glass.” First, Shinoda, who doesn’t do the sniffling wimp well, wrestles with a bad case of Ed Kowalczyk envy, singing about such Live staples as having one’s souls cleansed and becoming whole again at the riverbed, before suffering with a bout of Icarus envy, flying to the heavens but sounding like a moron who fell to earth.

Linkin Park finally goes for the jugular on the venomous revenge opus “Victimized.” While Shinoda is singing about snakes in the grass, Bennington goes all screamo, unleashing his inner-Trent Reznor with throat-shredding vocals that are enough to send shivers down your spine.

Shinoda unleashes a trash-talking tirade that produces more giggles than goose pimples on “Until It Breaks.” Busting out rhymes with the finesse of a bull in a china shop (and make as much sense as why a bull would be in a china shop in the first place), Shinoda delivers such inane drivel as, “You ain’t got a sliver of a chance/I get iller. I deliver while you quiver in your pants” and, my personal favorite, “I don’t run the track. No I make the track run.” Well, now there’s a useless super-power if I’ve ever heard one.

Bennington, who can sing, comes in near the tail-end, pontificating about a rising sun, kingdom come and how “the body bends until it breaks and sings again no more” which, in this case, couldn’t come soon enough.